2nd turn #compost

New rain gauge, much easier to read.

0/2 for in-place upgrades of Ubuntu 22 to 24.

Pokey is great. Now I need Home Assistant notifications to use nostr.

Organic bird feeder. Blue elderberry and juvenile cedar waxwings.

First saffron of the season

I finished the first compost pile with my temperature sensor measuring from start to finish: The temperature sensor is very useful to know more about what's going on inside the pile, and when it's time to turn the pile. Here's the new pile I started last night. Seeing that number go up is very reassuring. The blue line is ambient air temperature. #compost #permies #grownostr

he took his notes with him. opsec.

Stacking life today

My compost temperature sensor is producing great data, like showing how I put too much rocket fuel into this latest pile:

GitHub

GitHub - zappityzap/compost-sensor: Arduino-based compost sensor, integrated with Home Assistant.

Arduino-based compost sensor, integrated with Home Assistant. - zappityzap/compost-sensor

I found the source of battery drain on the compost sensor. It was the infernal Adafruit soil moisture sensor all along! sleep(), deepsleep() and RTC wake were all the same. The new Chirp! moisture sensors support sleep(), so I'll try those out soon. For now, it's time to build a few production models and start composting! View quoted note →

deepSleep() for the compost sensor was a bust. Left half is sleep(), right is deepSleep(). Trying out some new code now with RTCZero that sets an alarm on the real-time clock to wake up from standby mode.

First results on optimizing battery life for the compost sensor: This chart measures the voltage of the battery over time. The first steeper slope is a baseline, with a simple CPU delay() called during the loop(). The second shallower slope is calling sleep() from the LowPower Arduino library. Not as much improvement as I expected, so I'll try deepSleep() next.